A round-up of spectacular explosions

Blog Post by: James Lileks

July 2, 2013 - 12:10 PM

You may have read that the Russian space agency had a setback: well.

As for the cause: RIA Novosti says:

A source in the Russian space industry earlier told RIA Novosti that preliminary conclusions about the possible causes of the failed launch could be ready in two-three days, but speculated that it was most likely a technical problem with the ill-fated DM-3 booster.

The source also said the launches from the Baikonur space center will be most likely suspended for the next 2-3 months as the area was contaminated by about 200 metric tons of toxic rocket fuel.

Yum! Here’s another angle:

In the second video, people are shown running away because they believe the rocket is coming towards them. Not an entirely irrational belief.

Would you like to see other things blowing up, but on purpose? Very well. Gage Towers in Mankato goes down, but not before there’s a series of extremely satisfying explosions.

You’ll want to see that again, right? Here’s another view.

But what did it look like in Slo-Mo?

Note the person on the bottom right who’s shooting it in vertical mode. Hopeless.

”DYING ON THE” PUNS TO START SOON Instagram’s addition of video will kill Vine, they said. CNBC notes that it’s happening rather quickly:

After reaching a peak of nearly 2.9 million shares on June 15, Vine shares on Twitter dropped sharply to 1.35 million—more than a 50 percent decrease—on June 21, just a day after Instagram video was launched.

Strikingly, on that very same day Vine saw the spike, Instagram shares on Twitter surpassed Vine shares on Twitter, perhaps signaling that Vine users fled the platform to embrace the now-multi-purpose Instagram.

Adding video to Instagram was both unnecessary and inevitable. They can stop adding features now. We’re fine. Meanwhile, in Vineland: Daily Dot has the story behind the most famous selfie from last week. In related news, I hate the word selfie.

The Hills rushed the field while Kayleigh filmed the entire thing on Vine, Twitter's video application, right up until the point where security personnel detained them. The video has since been removed from Twitter but the following GIF has been preserved.

There’s an alternate universe where someone would ask you a question you don’t know the answer to and you would respond, “I don’t know, why don’t you AltaVista it?” Instead, in the real world, you reply, “Why don’t you Google it?” AltaVista, once the most advanced and comprehensive search engine on the Web, is just days away from its last breath.

I stopped using Facebook a long time ago, but I didn’t want to remove my account and have no visibility on how or what Facebook might be showing about me or someone using my name. So I decided to simply remove all my Facebook content.

Just over a year and a half ago, on January 30, 2012, I deleted every single Wall post I had ever made. By hand. One. By. One.

Last October, I logged in for a look-see and was stunned to find out that all of my deleted posts had been restored by Facebook and were present on my Timeline for all my friends to see. I fumed. I cursed them loudly on Twitter. And I deleted, not hid, deleted, every single one of my Wall posts again. By hand. One. By. One.

The first time you launch the Facebook application, even before logging in, your phone number will be sent over the Internet to Facebook servers. You do not need to provide your phone number, log in, initiate a specific action, or even need a Facebook account for this to happen.

According to Google Play, hundreds of millions of devices have installed the Facebook application and a significant portion of those devices are likely affected.

We reached out to Facebook who investigated the issue and will provide a fix in their next Facebook for Android release. They stated they did not use or process the phone numbers and have deleted them from their servers.

I’m sure useful, data-rich information like that was deleted as soon as possible. The drives were demagnetized and buried in a landfill next to the ET Atari cartridges.